State of Topaz: August 29, 2010
So, as another summers comes to a close, things are looking a little bit down. Activity's been rather low since Zero and Quinn left, several people are on to live lives and most are going back to school, and Badara is no where to be found (yet). We had hoped to get out the demo by the end of the summer but it seems to have stalled for now, not only on the programming side (okay, mostly on the programming side but not Badara's fault, there's some stuff Staff were supposed to do too, I'll get to that in a moment.) It's kind of funny, really, since in most other fangames and TRPGs whenever someone makes a sprite people jump all over it with "OMG so amazing!"s and such, but here on Topaz it sometimes takes a while to get noticed. However, there's actually a lot of good news as well, so let's get on to that!
Firstly, I'd like to announce that Topaz created the "VIP status" a while ago, for people who have mostly had good ideas and commentary but not necessarily a hugely visible contributory portion for Topaz. There aren't special colours or anything for them yet but they have access to some special content and forums for them to have input in. Not that we do too many "super seekrut" things away from public eyes but there a few spoilerific storyline and serious discussions that go on there. So firstly, I'd like to announce that all of the former RPG Staff (BlackTempleGuardian, HavocWraith and NyteFyre), Cyndadile and Zenith are now VIPs, congratulations!
Which brings me to the TRPG, which has been cancelled here, mainly due to Zero (and ragingprimeape) having been the major driving force behind that. ragingprimeape, the RPG staff and I agreed that the Topaz TRPG would move back to Orange Islands, even though we'll have to wait a while to get started since OI is right now on the verge of releasing Amaya and changing sites.
We do have some new concept art, this time of Ampure:
http://a.imageshack.us/img534/4140/ampureheadphones.png
Why have another concept of Ampure when Oykawoo's is so amazing? Well, Quinn decided to make us a nice Topaz Music Player interface which will probably be used for the CD/MP3 system Topaz will have. Part of the idea is to have skins to apply to the interface so that trainers can customize their players a little. Kind of like:
http://a.imageshack.us/img440/8178/mp3edit2.png
So here's hoping to that happening!
In the past 24 days, Reliability went and doubled that sprite count of his for the summer, and has now finished a full 30 backsprites this summer, and thus completed his goal. I was thinking of just not posting any so that you all would go check yourselves (and COMMENT) but then breaking up text with images is good so I'll put a couple up here. There's plenty more to see though!
http://a.imageshack.us/img832/5732/180flintusk.pnghttp://a.imageshack.us/img405/8354/191noctiger.pnghttp://a.imageshack.us/img835/6996/119frostorm.png
Against all my protests the Little Corrections Topic has now been opened for (small!) moveset revamps. The Echoise line just had a revamp and now the Celsinge line is under discussion. Feel free to say something about them.
Pokedex Entries have done pretty well recently, thanks to some of the newer members piping up around there. Though I'd like to see a little bit more presentation of why an entry is better as opposed to simply churning out another entry every post, you can't complain at activity, I'm guessing. For your information, since last SoT, Absol, Muk and Dunsparce were finished, and there are several that are literally one vote/bump away from being officialized. So, those who have been avoiding the forum lately, or just haven't voted much, make your voices heard!
In the last episode of The Renaming Topc, Triumph Spire and Las Nieves were winning the race to be the new names of Champion's Tower and Frost Town. While the first seems to have won, a new challenger has come up to take the honourable name of that little ice town by Mt. Frost! In particular, a whole host of variants of "blue" have come up, the most prominent of which is "Skobeloff Town" (which does have a very northern ring to it, doesn't it?) Will this new challenger rise to take its place or will Las Nieves keep hold of it's lead? It's up to you.
Items have been moving along pretty nicely, with Berry Smoothie having a new sprite and it actually being up on the Items list now (along with X Special Defense) :X Well, here's the sprite:
http://a.imageshack.us/img375/7218/berrysmoothie.png
For starting spriters, item sprites are actually not a bad place at all to start! The 24x24 size means that you only have to deal with 576 pixels, often much less, a sizable step down from the 6400 doing a Pokemon sprite would require. Since it's so small it's really easy to cover up things, you don't need much shading, and you can use lots of basic shapes!
Also, for newer members, we need some help converting the heights/weights of our Pokemon from imperial to metric measurements. I've had some help but I'm sure ragingprimeape and Cyndadile are bored to death of being the ones to help out on my every request, so here's a good place to help out of if you're lost!
Now for the two biggest things we need for the demo, on our side:
Move Animations: Try 'em. Love 'em. Seriously.
And also, there's the in-game dex of all the Topaz Pokemon, which we'll need to actually implement the Pokemon ingame. If you want to help with this aspect (it's mainly filling in blanks) just send me a PM with your gmail if you have one. I'll send you the google doc and some instructions.
Thanks for all the time you've put into reading this and helping with Topaz, if you have any questions, just ask here.
